Tip #1: Purchase an extra button or two for your project and sew it to the inside of your finished garment (you may have seen this in better ready-to-wear garments). This way, if you lose a button, you’ll have an exact replacement handy.

Tip #2: When working with meshes, eyelets, and loose-weave fabrics, use straight pins with larger heads, which won't slip through these fabrics the way a smaller pin head can.

Note: If a project below includes a printable pattern, you’ll see a “p” next to its title. If a project doesn’t include a pattern template, it likely consists of simple fabric shapes (like squares and rectangles) that you can easily measure and cut yourself. And note that some projects may be designed for a specific type of sewing machine. However, if a project you like calls for, say, complex embroidery stitches and you have just a simple zigzag machine, you can try experimenting with a satin stitch, hand-embroidering a design, or adding purchased embellishments instead.

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Sewing Quick Tip:

If there’s a crease down the middle of your yardage that you can’t press out and you have pattern pieces that need to be placed on the fold line, try this layout: Fold the top half of your fabric down and the bottom half up so that the selvedges meet in the middle. Then you can lay your pattern pieces along either the top or bottom fold, avoiding the crease.